In response to budget problems, many urban school systems reduced resources for getting students to come to school, such as truancy officers. Chicago, for instance, in 1991, went from 150 truancy officers down to a total of zero. Is that a good idea? In this study, we explore the effects of increased support by a pro‐social adult, or “social capital,” delivered through a structured student monitoring and mentoring program called Check & Connect (C&C). We carried out a large‐scale randomized controlled trial with C&C in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to students in grades 1 to 8. Program participation decreased absences in grades 5 to 7 by 4.2 days, or 22.9 percent, but had no detectable effects on students in grades 1 to 4. We also did not find statistically significant effects on learning outcomes such as test scores or GPA, or any detectable spillovers to other students within the schools where the program was administered. The modest impacts per dollar spent, compared to previous evidence on either low‐cost “nudges” or relatively intensive, higher‐cost interventions, raise the possibility that, for very disadvantaged students, there may be decreasing returns that are then followed by increasing returns to program intensity for the problem of student disengagement.
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Although most students with disabilities (SWDs) receive instruction from general education teachers, little empirical work has investigated whether these students have suitable access to high-quality teachers. We explore the differences in teacher quality experienced by SWDs and students without disabilities (non-SWDs) in the Los Angeles Unified School District, examining how access varies within schools as well as across school-level disadvantage rates. We leverage several different indicators of teacher effectiveness for general education teachers who instruct both SWDs and non-SWDs. We find that SWDs are significantly more likely to have teachers with lower math value-added (–0.024 standard deviations) than their non-SWD peers, and we find emerging gaps in teacher evaluation scores and exposure to novice teachers. In general, these gaps do not vary by school-level disadvantage.
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